Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jul 26, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
One of my inside sales training course clients had a real dilemma a couple of weeks ago. Since her Lead Qualification reps were being compensated on appointments being sent to the field, she was finding that there were a significant number of unqualified appointments being made, and the Field salespeople were beginning to complain.
One of the problems was that there wasn’t a lead grading system in place, so a lead was characterized as either being an appointment or a non-appointment. This is not an isolated incident, and I see this quite frequently. Naturally, if no lead grading system is in place, Business Development reps will create as many appointments as they can, because that’s how they’re measured and compensated.
To fix this, a lead grading system should be put in place, and compensation should be adjusted accordingly. My feeling is that unqualified leads should never be part of a compensation package, and the best place to start is by defining what constitutes an “A,” or fully qualified and compensated lead.
One of the concepts I teach is that there are six basic qualification question types, and each question should be asked on every qualification call. Here they are, along with my ideas on the responses that might constitute an “A” lead:
Requirements: The prospect has defined at least one technical or product/service requirement that links to an element of the proposed solution.
Timeframe: The prospect intends to buy within 90 days.
Decision Tree: The decision process is defined, leading up to the appropriate VP or CXO.
Scope: The potential size of the opportunity is defined, encompassing all individuals, departments, and divisions within the enterprise that will be eventually using the solution.
Business/Consequence: A business problem is identified that links to the proposed solution, as well as the consequences of not solving the problem.
Budget: Has a budget been allocated for the solution in question? This question must always be asked, but a “no” answer is not necessarily a deal-breaker, as budgets can be allocated if the Business/Consequence, Requirements, and Timeframe answers constitute a qualified lead.
This is a model, and it’s going to vary somewhat depending on your product. For transactional sales, maybe the “A” lead timeframe is 30 days. For large enterprise deals, maybe it’s 3-12 months. You can craft your own “B” and “C” categories after you’ve determined what an “A” lead is, and perhaps tweak your comp plan to reflect that as well.
Although the issue on the table is sales leads going to Field reps, the case for ranking lead qualification categories is critical for all Business Development teams. Asking the Field for input regarding what they think constitutes an “A” lead is important too. After all, the Field is the customer.
If you’re a Business Development manager who hasn’t yet implemented a lead ranking system, now’s a good time to start. And if you already have, it’s worth a check at least once a year to ensure that youre ranking system is giving the Field what it needs, and you’re compensating your team members on the activities that best reflect on the profitability of the company. And be sure to add Lead Ranking development and maintenance to your Best Management Playbook.
Posted by www.alextrain.com Admin on Mon, Jul 19, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
This week I’m delivering a presentation to the American Teleservices Association under the topic of Call Center Training: Trends, Techniques, and Tools. All of what I’ll be discussing comes directly from what I teach in my inside sales training courses, and it’s important enough that I’m including the ideas I’ll be discussing here in this week’s blog post.
It’s in outline form, but all of you Inside Sales Directors and Managers will find enough data in it to compare it with how you’re training your team now. This training process has made thousands of reps successful, so take a look:
You’ll want to train your inside sales team on the following 6 focus areas:
1) Pre-call research skills
2) Contact skills
3) Qualification and Questioning skills
4) Closing skills
5) Understanding and developing organizational structures
6) Objection handling
Defining the 6 most critical training focus areas
1) Pre-call research skills
a) Prior same-company contacts in your CRM
b) The prospect company’s website
c) Prerequisite: ensure your reps all have their own LinkedIn profiles, and have added their customers and colleagues as contacts to their own LI profiles
c) Look at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. Check for interesting background info as well as people in common
d) Prospect website, Hoovers or OneSource, if necessary to find the proper executive
e) Do reaserach in three minutes or fewer, so you can make your call KPIs
2) Contact skills
a) Have a concrete sales objective prior to making the call
b) Call High whenever possible
c) Use appropriate opening language to the title of the individual you’re addressing (Admins, execs, etc)
3) Qualification and Questioning skills
a) Determine which questions must be asked to fully qualify the prospect. Included would be Timeframe, Requirements, Size of opportunity, Decision process, Budget
4) Closing skills
5) Understanding and developing organizational structures
6) Objection handling
Reinforce your training continually by:
1) Role playing through mock telephone calls
2) Side-by side, in booth coaching during actual telephone calls
Three of the most common issues I deal with in training
1) Failure to establish a valid call objective
2) Inability to call high
3) Lack of understanding of the prospect’s business, and how he or she will gauge the ROI of my proposed solution
So there’s a précis of the model. Successful training programs are both an art and a science, and this model presents many of the most important scientific elements. Now you’ve just got to add the art. Add this model to your Best Management Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jul 12, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Today's post wasn't written by me. It was written by an individual that has just landed herself an outstanding six-figure inside sales job. I know her, because she took one of my inside sales training courses. More than one company was bidding for her, so she was able to choose from among several. How was she able to accomplish this? She gave outstanding employment interviews, and I know, because I got feedback from more than one company. She "wowed" everyone, so I asked her what the heck she did to gain all this traction. She told me, and I asked her to put it in writing for the blog. She wants to remain anonymous, but we'll call her Allison for the record. What she says below should be adopted by everyone looking for an inside sales or qualification job, and most of it actually applies to just about any job. It's 4 pages long, but trust me, it's worth it.
Here's what Allison says:
How to Prepare for a Sales Job Interview – Not exactly like a date, but close!
When you get asked out for a date, wouldn’t you want to know who you’re dating, what the person is like and how much fun you think you’ll have? With the internet as your tool, you can easily find the answers to these questions on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Podcasts and Google searches. It is no different for a job interview. You can use these sites to mine company and personnel information. Knowing the answers to these questions about a company and the people you will be interviewing with will have you prepared and possibly close the interview as well. Do your homework!
When I receive that wonderful call about scheduling an interview, there are several steps I take to prepare. Most importantly, I treat my interview from my first point of contact to the last as a sales call which has a beginning, middle and end structure to it. I also set my intention of getting the close (the job) by being prepared with the knowledge of “who, what and how” (homework).
In the Beginning - Before the Interview
Before I find the office on MapQuest and park my car to get to the interview on time, I need to know “who am I talking to?” The company’s website has loads of information to answer this question. Most company websites have an “about us” tab. This information will tell you what the company does and usually has a marketing tag line in the likes of answering “…we create an efficient way to save money and time with our software product…” It’s a compelling, succinct and simple message that the company wants its potential customers to understand and is known as “branding.” Knowing a company’s branding message is very important in understanding the product and what problems it can solve for their client. If you get the job, you will need to know this to meet your quota.
In addition to knowing a company’s branding message, it’s important to know about the company in its competitive market. Who are their competitors? What is the differentiation of their product in comparison? It’s good to know whether the company has recently been acquired, are currently active in acquiring other companies, its financial strength and whether it is a national or global company. I use Hoovers.com to get a brief overview of the company. You don’t need to pay for their in-depth service. If the company is a publicly traded company, information about the company is readily available. You can also search for a company in LinkedIn.com for the same purpose.
Another component to “who am I talking to?” Are the Executive Team (E.T.) and most importantly, whom you will be interviewing with. Again, the company website will have a tab to view the E.T. with their previous job experiences, which will tell you if you have any connections to their past companies. Most of the time, the people you will interview with, although important enough to hire you, will not be on the website under the E.T. and you will have to dig further. It is why it is critical to know the correct spelling of the names of the people and their job titles of whom you will be meeting so that you can review their profiles on LinkedIn.com. I use LinkedIn.com to get a sense of the person/people I will be talking to in an effort to create a connection in the interview. If you find an interesting tidbit about the person, he/she will recognize that you searched their profile in LinkedIn. This information alone, can give you a lead in building rapport during the interview (more on that later). In addition, you should have your own LinkedIn profile as it is now the business standard.
What does the company do? Read the “Press Releases.” Press Releases are a company’s pitch of putting their best foot forward. Select one or two that peak your interest. It will give you something you can talk about during the interview. Knowing whether the company has received recent venture capital support, current business partnerships, won industry awards, or launched a new product or version. This information will ignite your enthusiasm and ability to articulate that you did your homework about the company. This will also tell you if you like the company, where it’s going and answer if you want to work for them.
How does the product solve a client’s problem? Read a “Success Story.” You’ll need to know this to meet your sales quota. Does this solve a problem for one person, SMB (small/medium businesses), Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 or other? Does this solve a problem on a national or global scale? You’ll need to know this if you have a geographic territory and whether or not you have the experience to call a variety of markets. This will also tell you about the vertical markets the company is attempting to reach.
Review the job description. This will tell you how the company believes the client’s problems will be solved. The job description will tell you what you will be responsible for and what type of work experience they are looking for. You will need this information to build your compelling stories of WHY you are the right person for the job.
In the Middle - During the Interview
In real estate, the mantra is “location, location, location.” Location is all that matters. The best locations are usually where the best deals are to be had. In sales, whether it is doing your job or going on an interview for a job, my mantra is “connect, connect, connect.” In sales, if you cannot quickly connect with the prospect be it a warm or cold lead, you won’t have a close. People buy from people. In the case of job interviews, the interviewers are the “buyers.” You are the “seller,” selling the goods i.e. YOU.
You must have compelling stories to tell aside from your resume about how you are the perfect person to fill their needs in the job opportunity available. Understand that your resume gets you to the interview or in some cases; helps recruiters get you in the door. Your connection of stories between what you (the seller) can do for them (the buyer) is what is critical to a successful interview.
Actively listen. There is a saying in sales, that “the first person to speak loses the sale.” When you are actively listening, you are taking mental notes on how to respond to the interviewer’s interest in you and how you can help the company with your skill set. You will spend a good amount of time listening to the interviewers talk about the company, where it’s going and what they would like to accomplish with filling in this job. This is a good time to ask each interviewer’s job title and responsibilities so that you can understand the reporting relationship and what’s at stake for hiring you, a highly qualified sales person.
Build a rapport. Remember, this interview is a two-way street. Build a rapport with each person interviewing you. You need to create dialog to show interest and ability to articulate that you can do the job. Asking questions is the best way to create conversation. Sometimes you will meet on a one-to-one basis and other times the interview is a group interview. The sole purpose for you in an interview is to build a relationship (connect, connect, connect) to create a dialog (compelling stories) about how you can solve their need to increase sales. It’s up to you to create an on-going articulate conversation.
Some questions to ask:
What is the most challenging objection to purchasing this product? How do you overcome the objection? What do you like about the company? Where do you see yourself and the company in 5 years? Who are your competitors? How do you differentiate your product?
You’ll need to know this if you get the job. Why not know what’s in store for selling the product? Know the hurdles the company is against in improving sales growth.
Know your numbers. In sales, it’s a numbers game. All sales people know their numbers: quotas, KPI’s (e.g. 40-60 calls a day) and percent of outcomes of prospects to close. You should be able to quote from memory what you have accomplished in numbers.
Top Skills. Have a list of your Top 20 Skills (I got this great recommendation from a VP of Sales) and another list of five specific skills in detail related to the job to have for yourself in the interview to remember and discuss while in conversation. You can craft a generic list of your own or use the job description for listing necessary skills. At the end of the interview hand this copy to your interviewer. Handing this list to the interviewer shows that you have confidence in yourself and helps the interviewer position you in the company’s organizational chart. The fact that you crafted a list and gave it to the interviewer will leave a lasting impression.
Be positive. Nobody wants to work with a stick in the mud. How would you feel if your date was negative and complained about past relationships? What would you think if you had to listen to boring stories? Wouldn’t that tell you that this date isn’t going to work? All your worries about not having a job, needing money, the “what ifs” about not getting this job, etc, leave these at home before you drive in the car to the interview. Be positive about your compelling stories, your abilities, your past work experience, people that you have worked with and other hobbies you might have.
Be passionate. Have a passion that has nothing to do with work. I’m a baseball fan and I am passionate about the game, the score and the players. For others, cooking, art, sailing, collecting and traveling are other passions. Wouldn’t you rather work with someone who has a passion than not?
The end - The Close of the Interview
When you sense that the interview is coming to a close, you can ask:
What is your time frame for hiring? In your opinion, how do I (you) rate against the other candidates at this time? What are the next steps?
Be thankful. Make sure you get a business card of those you meet. It will give you their email addresses. Thank all the interviewers with a strong handshake and nice smile. Write an email within 24 hours to thank them for their time. Understand that you both spent time out of your day to meet while other things were boiling on the stove. As long as you can show respect for them it shows that you have respect for yourself as well. Look at this as a possible beginning rather than a means to an end. Your paths might cross again.
Reply and Stay Active. Once you have sent your thank you email, return any emails and calls from them as promptly as you would any sales call. Your response shows how you are an active sales person by treating the interviewer as a prospect.
In summary
Preparing for a Sales Job Interview is not exactly like a date, but close in knowing the “who, what and how” elements it takes to understand why you are there in the first place. It has been my experience that no interviewer wants to see a candidate fail. For some interviewers, it’s just as uncomfortable for them to interview you as it is for you to be interviewed. As long as you know that you have done your best in doing your homework and creating a connection, it is the most you can ask of yourself.
- Warm regards, and Play Ball!
Geoff here again: I can't add anything, except take Allison's great advice whenever you're applying for an inside sales or qualification job, and add it to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Jul 06, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
I got a call this past week from a prospect that wants us to deliver an inside sales training course, and one of his main challenges is that his reps aren’t always asking a closing questions when they have the opportunity, and he’s convinced that sales are being lost because of it. And they probably are, because if his reps aren’t asking closing questions, his competitors’ reps probably will.
I’ve always believed that you have to fully qualify on the first call, and close on the next step, too. I learned this technique from Bob Tumbleson, so was my boss during the first sales job I ever had. This was an outside sales position, something of a misnomer, because we were at a sales office, and our prospects came in to see us. They visited us because we had a service that interested them. Bob always said that we had to close them on an order when they came in, because they’d never be back. “There are no be-backs,” Bob used to say. My first week on the job, I let a prospect leave who promised to return, and Bob told me that he would use that instance to prove his point.
And sure enough, the prospect never returned. So I made it a point after that to close every prospect. Sometimes they’d want to go out to the car “to get the checkbook.” I told them that was great, because “I need to get some fresh air, too,” and walked out with them, just in case they decided to drive away without signing up, like they told us they would. This tended to really flesh out price objections, and we did have some leeway, so I had an 80% close rate. I had no “drive-offs.” Our service was great, too, and just about every prospect became an enthusiastic customer.
One of my most popular posts is on the subject of the one-call close, and it’s worth reading if you haven’t done so, because it describes how to do this effectively in an 8 minute telephone call. What I learned from Bob Tumbleson years ago, I still believe today. There are no be-backs. You've only got one shot at a conversation, because the prospect may never ever take your call again. This is an extremely important concept for enterprise sales, and it goes without saying that this is critical for transcational sales as well. If you adopt this philosophy and act on it, you’ll close more business faster, and your sales pipeline will be more meaningful, too. Now that you’re starting a new month/quarter, it’s worth kicking it off by seriously considering this strategy. Add it to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 28, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
I got a call this week from a blog subscriber that desperately needed some tips for selling in a "down" economy. Now that summer's here, his prospects are ramping down in terms of their purchases. He's really feeling it at the end of the quarter, and wants to ensure he doesn't have the same situation at the end of the upcoming quarter as well.
The philosophy I teach in my inside sales training courses has always been that you sell all year ‘round just the same as you would when things are tough. Great sales practices should be in place all the time. So here are four tips that are critically important right now. And once you do them consistently, you shouldn't have too many under-quota months:
1) Upsell and cross-sell to your current customers. Your customers already know you. You've done a great job for them, your solutions are working, and they're happy. But if you're ignoring them, you're not only leaving the door open for the competition, but you're missing out on additional sales, I'll bet. Why don't you call to introduce a solution that your customer might not have acquired yet? Even if he or she said "no" in the past, it doesn't mean things haven't changed.
2) In terms of cross-selling, make sure that you are in contact with all corporate entities under your customers' umbrella. You've got a same-enterprise reference, so call all of those other companies. Call high into those companies, tell the exec what you've been doing for his or her colleagues, then get engaged in an initiative at a new same-enterprise company for which your offering is a solution.
3) Know why every company in your territory is not doing business with you. My old boss Perry Lynne had us keep a record of what he called "lost sales," which told him not only who wasn't buying, but why. And what was surprising was that when we asked, we found a lot of great data, and it opened the door for us at numerous companies. Parenthetically, it was also a great CYA tool if we ever got asked why a company wasn't our customer. If asked, I could simply go to the database, and prove that there was a valid reason. And if there hadn't been a valid reason in the first place, I often had a conversation about it, and that prospect then became my customer.
4) Ask your customers what project they're using your solution on. Customers want to talk about their business more than yours, and if they love your product, they'll tell you how they use it to make their area work more efficiently and effectively. If you do ask this question, I guarantee this: at least once every few conversations, you'll be lead down a path that will open the door to another of your solutions that the customer doesn't yet own. All you have to do is listen.
It's the nature of salespeople to forget about a customer once he or she has placed the order, because money is already "in the bank." If your company is like most, you have a product or engineering team coming up with new exciting stuff that appears once every quarter or so, but you might be so focused on new business that you forget about the people that have already given you their business.
Upselling, cross-selling, knowing why people aren't buying, and asking about your customers' business never go out of style, and using these techniques constantly will keep you out of the sales doldrums, especially in tough times. Add them to your Best Practices Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 21, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Salesforce.com is a CRM database tool that's become the standard for many companies' inside sales teams, and I've seen it used many times when I coach team members during my inside sales training courses. It's powerful, but like most robust tools, it needs to be tweaked for the characteristics of the team using it, based on use cases. Generally, I encourage my clients to either have a dedicated Saleforce.com expert on staff, or utilize a consultant to assist in making the best use of the CRM.
One of my blog correspondents is going nuts over how her company has implemented Salesforce, and she's made a very cogent, if impassioned, statement about how it's not working as well as it should at her company. What triggered her correspondence to me was the ongoing discussion on the blog based on my KPI (Key Performance Indicators) post. She's got a litany of concerns, including some that relate to intra-company politics, but basically what she's dealing with is a sales process that's not working as well as it could. She wants to remain anonymous, which is why I'm telling the story here, and it's not listed as a blog response.
I'm posting it here, because she addresses issues that I've been hearing a lot over the past few months. I'll let her tell it in her own words. If you can relate to her issues, you'll know you're not alone. And if you don't have similar problems, congratulate your CRM expert for doing a great job.
Here's what she has to say:
"Data Quality 101. I've been burned by the company buying a bunch (7000+) of "leads" from somewhere & loading them into Salesforce.
"The alleged quality was questionable. For a 10% sample of my patch I kept statistics on: address, phone, URL, description & contact. Boiled down to taking an AVERAGE of 7 minutes to bring a single Account record up to callable quality. So I'm doing DATA ENTRY, while I'm paid on sales. Would you have any idea if there's a mechanism or accessory for Salesforce that quarantines incoming 'leads' into a pending status before accepting them a valid?
"One of my big, first clues to Salesforce was their introductory training video... where at one point they go out of their way to emphasize the importance of using "good naming standards/conventions" when choosing a opportunity name. So if one time it's called BCBS MA & another time Blue Cross/Blue Shield Massachusetts & another time BlueCross/BlueShield Mass... duh you'll get results all over the place. Guess what? Busy salespeople are NOT typists. They'll make up whatever name makes sense to them at the moment.
"Surfing the Salesforce site last night was not enlightening. ‘Data Quality' seems to be no more complex than de-duplicating. Basic challenge... when the CEO puffs up his chest ‘We're using Salesforce...' which means we're way cool, this essentially slams the door on the question, ‘...yes, but HOW well are we using it?' Another non-unique challenge... the freshly appointed Salesforce administrator took it as personal insult to imply that just perhaps everything in Salesforce wasn't 100% up to snuff. How dare you challenge my manhood! I just do not understand why people get so tied up in their shorts over common stuff like this... admit it, knuckle down & fix it & get on to selling."
Geoff here again. So there you have it, some pretty frustrating words from an inside sales rep trying to motor through a challenging situation. Lots of my readers are management people at startups, just beginning to put together an inside sales team. If you're in this category, put some serious thought into pre-tweaking your CRM to get in inline with your KPIs, and try making a few calls yourself as a use case to ensure that your system is set up to optimize the successful work of your reps. Add this to your Best Management Playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 14, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
One of my most popular blog posts is the one dealing with getting "shopped" by purchasing folks that ask you to bid on a project that you've already lost. Now that the economy is nicely rebounding, my inside sales training customers are telling me that unsolicited RFPs (requests for proposals) and RFQs (requests for quotes) are starting to come in over the transom, from telephone and email from prospects to whom they've never spoken.
Answering these blindly without talking to someone first is always a mistake, because in all probability, some competitor of yours has already gotten there, the decision has been made against you, and the person that contacted you did so to do some price comparison for the purpose of grinding your competitor's price down a bit.
So you've really got to have a telephone conversation with the individual requesting the RFP or RFQ. And when you do, you'll always want to ask this great question:
"What other solutions are you considering?"
The answer to this question should tell you where you are in the sales process. It will tell you who got there first, and your follow-on questions will tell you if you have a ghost of a chance to get the business. If a known competitor is involved, I always ask what the prospect likes about the competitor, and if he or she could "wave the magic wand," how could the competitor be better? I'm looking for holes in my competitor's offering that will open the business for me. If I hear a lot of good about the competitor and no negatives, I'll ask the following tricky question:
"It sounds like you like [competitor] really well. Is there anything preventing you from just going with them?"
And one of two things will happen. The prospect will come clean and tell you he or she is doing "due diligence," another term for "you lose." Or, as has happened a few times in my own sales world, the contact will tell me that there are some perceived issues with the competitor that weren't flushed out earlier. Now we've got something going!
Of course there are other factors of importance, too. What is the title of the individual that is asking for the RFQ? If he or she is in Purchasing or HR, it's far enough away from your technology focus area that you're probably being shopped. In this case, I'd recommend calling high into your product solution area, and talk to an exec that can tell you if an initiative is on the table. If so, you may be able to break into the sales process and get some real traction.
Unless you're dealing in commodities, unsolicited RFPs and RFQs are always a red flag. And even in commodities sales, you do want to have a conversation before you take the time to craft a proposal and put it in your sales pipeline. It's always worth doing a check up to ensure that your company is the front-runner. Add those all-important front-end conversations to your Best Practices playbook.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 07, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Today I'm flying over the Kamchatka Peninsula. It's completely covered in snow, with huge Mt. Fuji-shaped volcanic peaks thrusting out of the landscape. Relatively few extol the beauty of Kamchatka because it's not exactly a tourist destination, remote and uncompromising. It looks cold down there, and it reminds me that no matter how bad a grim sales day can be, there are many jobs that are worse than sales. Just ask those miners working 30,000 feet below me.
But then again there are a few really bad sales jobs, too. The story I'm going to tell you is one I sometimes tell in my telesales training classes, to illustrate how good the people I'm training really have it. They say every bad sales territory is salvageable. I'm not sure about this one. You tell me:
My dad's great with people, a natural story teller, and a real nice guy. Despite the fact that he had no college, he was hired as a sales rep for a significant building supplies company. He soon blew out the numbers in his territory, and the president rewarded him by giving him the largest territory in the company, one that had been underperforming for years. With the same success he'd achieved in the smaller territory, he was bound to be successful, right?
That territory was indeed huge, running from Monterey to Santa Barbara, at a time when California's Central Coast was on an unbelievable building boom. Highway 101 was, at that time, 2 lanes wide, one running in each direction. Dad was in the right place at the right time. But guess what? Nobody bought anything. Nobody wanted to talk to him either. He sometimes visited 6 hardware stores per day. No sales. Then he discovered the reason. Before my dad's sales predecessor in the territory had been fired, he'd been stealing significant amounts of supplies from the company warehouse, loading them into his car, taking to the road, then undercutting all competitors by selling his goods for pennies on the dollar. Not only could my honest dad not match the prices, but the buyers knew they'd been receiving stolen goods, so they didn't even want to see him walk in the door. His territory was, in the old military parlance, FUBAR (look it up, families read this blog). He gave it 3 more months, but finally quit the sales business entirely and went into the food business, which he felt was a lot cleaner. Dad was never told, going into the territory, that his customers had been sold stolen goods at barebottom prices, and once the previous rep had been fired, they were probably afraid of crime investigations as well. He had to find out on his own after his "promotion."
So what can we learn and take away from this crazy story of a territory gone bad?
When we're having a bad day, it's sometimes really motivating to get a sense of good things really are. Sure your CRM is slow. Sure marketing could get you more leads. And yes, you may feel your KPIs are unfair. That's when you want to brace up and get back to work, knowing that as bad as things seem, they're probably not bad to the magnitude that my dad's situation was. You're also not a miner in Kamchatka. We all have different ways of motivating ourselves, but reflecting for a moment on people that have things worse than we do is a damn good motivator if you're searching for one. Whatever your situation, you'll have an occasional bad day. So use that bad day to find new ways of thinking out of the box to find new opportunities, make more effective presentations, and do a better job of doing your own marketing to get you some better leads. Creativity is born out of frustration, so use those occasional frustrating days as springboards to thinking of new ways to make your territory more successful. The best salespeople always do.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Tue, Jun 01, 2010 @ 10:44 AM
This past week I delivered an inside sales training course to a client that makes devices used to diagnose electrical problems. This company makes terrific equipment, has begun to take market share away from its biggest competitor (who owns 90% of the market), and has hired me to train their inside sales team to take over and own the market in one year. In a coaching session that occurred last week, we cooked up some bright ideas that the competition probably won't be using. I'm going to tell you what they are, but I'm not going to divulge the client or the industry to protect our program. I've been teaching the techniques we're using for years now, but there are a few new twists because of some tools we're using today that fall into the Sales 2.0 realm. So read on, and use them to take over your focus industry as well.
My client has sold many devices into the mining industry, but there are a whole lot of mining concerns that haven't yet bought its equipment. One non-client is pretty well known, but has gone through bankruptcy proceedings in recent years, and we suspected there might be new owners. We googled the company, and found a story about them on Wikipedia, giving the new name of the company. We then did a search in the "people" field of LinkedIn, searching for the name of the new company. And we found a TQM (Total Quality Management) director.
We cold-called the TQM director and told her that we specialized in troubleshooting devices for the mining industry, and she referred us to the right executive in charge of that function. We're now on a roll with that company. There are three very good lessons to learn from this story, and you can apply them all today. One is about turning a "horizontal" solution into a "vertical" one. Another is intelligently using internet tools that are still considered a bit non-traditional. And the third is that there's nothing as good as a great cold call.
1) The Vertical piece. My client specializes in a solution, not an industry. But because the company has sold successfully into the mining industry, it is a de facto expert in mining solutions that relate to its devices. My client's reps are going to call every mining concern in the country. And I predict they'll soon own that segment in the market, because they're experts, and they're telling new prospects about it.
2) The Research piece. To uncover data we had to know, we used Google, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn. Sure our target prospect had prior trouble. But like many companies, they've been bailed out. They changed the name of the company, and are geared up again and making money. LinkedIn enabled us to find an individual we couldn't have found otherwise.
3) The Cold Call piece. The rep I coached loves cold calling. He's completely fearless, doesn't give a fig about rejection, and has an attitude that in reflective of the fact that he won't let anybody kick him around.
We're using a number of superior techniques to take over an industry, step by step, vertical by vertical. I've just described three of them. Thinking out-of-the-box and being fearless are two of the supporting elements that need to be in place for it all to work, and my client's reps are already making huge strides in that direction. Add those three techniques to your Best Practices playbook, and go out and tackle an industry yourself, starting this week.
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, May 24, 2010 @ 10:02 AM
Every time I teach one of my insides sales courses, one of the first things I do is ask what the folks in the room did prior to becoming inside sales people. Not only does this help me to know them better, but when we get to the part of the course where we talk about the importance of knowing the prospect's business, I can link it back to some expertise in business areas that the reps, in many cases, had forgotten they had. We're all experts in something related to business, and the kinds of questions I ask the reps, they can in turn ask to their prospects. Asking great business questions is often as simple as simply being interested.
A few of my past jobs generally surface as part of the class, too. I thought about one of them this week, because I read Brother Korte's obituary in the newspaper. I worked for Brother Korte at the Novitiate Winery in Los Gatos, CA one summer. He was a marketing genius that took the Jesuit's altar wine business, evolved it to the next step, and began winning awards at wine festivals. Brother Korte made ads for the winery's Ruby Cabernet, showing him in his priest's garb with the tag line "a devilishly good wine."
This was the early 1980s. I had just cooked up a deal with the military where I would be inducted as an officer to run a radio station in Europe (I'd done a lot of radio, and it was a good fit). But this was June, and induction would take place in August, so I'd need a summer job. I wanted a manual labor job to beef up before boot camp, so signed on at the Novitiate to work on the bottling line, which consisted of dumping empty bottles on the conveyor belt on one end, then sealing full boxes of wine and stacking a pallet with them on the other. At the end of each shift, every worker got a bottle of what was bottled that day. It was idyllic. The winery was in an old building in the mountains, and my co-workers and the priests for whom we worked were terrific. We had lunch at a picnic table overlooking all of Santa Clara Valley. A few years later, the Novitiate went out of the wine business, so it's all history now.
So I took an afternoon off last week to pay my respects to Brother Korte. None of the people I remembered from my days on the bottling line were at the memorial, so I drove up the mountain for the first time since the 80s, to visit what was left of the winery. A new concern has taken over, but the tasting room host walked me back to where I'd worked. Fresh bottles were coming off the new bottling line, but the old tanks were still there, still being used, and the place smelled wonderful, just like it had when I'd worked there.
As a young man working on a bottling line, I couldn't have guessed that a couple of decades later, I'd have achieved a lot of success in the business of inside sales. Inside sales is a career to which no one aspires in high school. We end up there by accident. For many, it's a way stop, then all of a sudden, it becomes fun, we make a good amount of money, and we realize we didn't find a career, it found us.
Although it was only a summer job, it stuck with me, and most months, I still think of it once or twice, because I do think that it contributed in its own way to what I was able to accomplish in inside sales, in terms of the value of doing one's job as perfectly as possible. And whenever I made an inside sales call to a company in the wine business, I mentioned my time on the bottling line, and it really broke the ice. Most wine execs have worked on the bottling line at one time too, as it turned out.
I'll bet you have one or two of those jobs in your past, too. When you're making a high level call to an exec in a field in which you've worked, mentioning it will turn a cold call into a warm one, I assure you. As I said before, engaging in business discussions with your prospects is critically important, particularly in enterprise sales where ROI is invariably a big part of the decision and sign-off process. It's as simple as simply being interested.